I have a client who needs to combine accrual dues billing with list bills. That is, a single invoice created for the dues of many individual members linked to the paying entity using the Bill To ID field on the Financial tab.
What I've found is that the billing process itself works pretty nicely but the payment application processes have some truly ugly bugs.
If you meet all three of the items listed below, you can just skip reading this post because you won't have a problem (at least as far as I know) with accrual dues + list bills:
- The number of members per list bill is low. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how low it needs to be, but if you get into the hundreds, you may be in trouble.
- You always receive a single check that pays the invoice in full.
- You never make a payment application error such as applying a payment to the wrong invoice.
Yeah, not a very likely set of conditions and my client doesn't fit any of them.
Here are the specific issues that I've seen so far:
Problem #1 - Can't apply a payment to large list bill
Using either Service Central or the Cash Receipts module, you may find that large list bills cannot be paid successfully. iMIS will hang and the transaction will fail to complete. My client ran into this for when trying to apply payments for about 2,000 members and also for several hundred.
The "fix" to this is that you can get a modified license key to use "Advanced Pay". You will be adding ADVPAY to your license code string and you will add a new stored proc to your db called sp_asi_ARPayment. I say "fix" in quotes because the use of ADVPAY causes other issues -- keep reading.
Be aware that this solution requires that you enter the payments for these large list bills using the AR module's Cash Receipts window and you must enter the invoice number into the Cash Receipts window. You cannot just enter the ID and apply the payment to the correct invoice line. You cannot use Service Central's payment window.
Problem #2 - Can't delete an existing payment
With or without ADVPAY in place, and whether using Service Central or AR/Cash's Cash Receipts window, a payment for an accrual dues list bill that has been previously entered cannot be deleted. Attempting to do so will hang iMIS. I've not found a fix to this problem. (SMR 196675)
Problem #3 - Can't correctly apply a second payment to an invoice
Haven't identified the reproducible set of circumstances to make this happen, but sometimes if applying a second payment to a invoice that wasn't fully paid by the first payment, the application of the second payment sets the Paid Thru date of all of the members to NULL. Nice, huh? This is due to a problem in the sp_asi_ARPayment proc but I've not figured out where the issue lies (yet). (SMR 183036)
Problem #4 - Can't enter a correct reversing payment if using ADVPAY
Since you can't delete a payment, then the only way to correct a payment entry error is to enter a reversing payment, right? If only life were so easy. If you're not using ADVPAY, entering a reversing payment does work. But if you are using ADVPAY, the sp_asi_ARPayment proc is written so that the reversing payment is 100% applied to Line #1 of the invoice. Fortunately, since the problem is in the proc, you can adjust the proc. I've done so (and I am really hoping I've done so correctly!) so I think I actually can claim a successful workaround for this issue! (SMR 195223)
By the way, this client is using version 10.6.30.17 but so far none of these issues have been identified by ASI Tech Support as having been resolved in later versions.
